Christmas carols are the creed of Christendom. They were born, we are told, in Assisi with the first crib celebrating the coming of Christ to the world. The Poor Man of Assisi and his own surged around the crèche where was laid the Child. These songs attested to that burst of popular piety that swept Europe sometime in the dawn of the high Middle Ages.
Did not that great heart that was G. K. Chesterton affirm that when we come to Bethlehem the man becomes the child and the child the man? God made Man: woman giving birth to her own Creator: Creator not disguised as creature but being one: a howling, babbling baby reaching for his mother’s milk.
The child in each one of us is fixed in adoration as he remembers his first Christmas. The adult is dazzled by theological speculations that corruscade from a manger and fix themselves in distant stars composing the loftiest heaven of human speculation: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word became flesh.” A man in worship becomes the child he once was, and from that child there comes wisdom. “Unless you become as little children . . . and the Spirit of Wisdom will fill the world.”
The world knew him not
We go to Bethlehem in many ways, but all of them send us to the same Infant. Kris Kringle and Santa Claus; St. Nicholas and the Three Kings; Epiphany and gold, incense, and myrrh. And never let us forget the old man who says in the England of Dickens:
Christmas is coming
The geese are getting fat
Please to put a penny
In the old man’s hat
If you haven’t got a penny,
A ha’ penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’ penny
Then God bless you.
Little more need be said about Christian charity. This little rhyme does it all. It sums up the poor man’s Christmas when the poor man’s God was born in a manger because there was no room for him at the inn. “And he came into the world and the world knew him not.”
I shall never forget what a very good friend once said to me about these issues: Catholic truths are literally true, whereas other religions tend to fade away into metaphor. Christmas means what it is. The Lord God literally became man. This truth is again encountered in the Holy Eucharist, where meaning is literally being. The bread and wine are what they mean, Christ himself.
The typical mind formed by the modern sensibility has been tricked into doubting that religion has anything to do with reality, with things as they are. Religion, for these folks, concerns our reactions to reality, and in these reactions there consists whatever meaning or intelligibility the religious dimension of life might have. Religion comforts and renders bearable the tragedies that wound us all. In this filling up of the subjective needs of man we discover the essential role of religion. A typical modern man is either reluctant to grant or refuses to grant any weight to existence understood in its most basic sense as fact, as something that happened.
Experiential preeminence
Did the Incarnation happen? There are men who simply deny that it happened. Beside these men we can draw swords and do battle, because we are both agreed that being or non-being is the most basic of all issues. Then again, there are men who hold that whether or not the Incarnation occurred is not an interesting topic. What interests these students of human nature is what man experienced as a result of an event that may or may not have taken place historically. I could cite a dozen scholars who have articulated this confusion, but I restrict myself to one, the late Professor Eric Voegelin.
He waxed eloquently throughout his life on the superiority of the Christian West to all other cultures, but he waffled when the time came to affirm the literal and existential truth of the creeds. For Voegelin the question of our Lord’s Incarnation and Resurrection was annoying. The risen Christ was the experience Paul had of him.
I recall writing a piece in which I excoriated the professor on Paul’s own grounds: “If Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain.” A number of Voegelinian scholars thought that my insistence was in bad form. In academia we do not talk about such things. Much earlier in the century the philosopher George Santayana, born in Spain (I lived in his family’s house in Avila for a time), but a quintessential Bostonian intellectual, in his remarkable book The Idea of Christ in the Gospels expounded the thesis that the Christ affirmed by Catholic Christianity is the only Christ.
Every Jesus hunted for in documents thought to be anterior to the Catholic canon is irrelevant. But this Christ affirmed by all the creeds is utterly too poetic, too magnificently splendid and beautiful, to have any serious roots in historical existence. Christ is too good to be. For Santayana the more perfect an ideal being, the less existence it possessed. By this reasoning we would have to conclude that something is better in the measure of its nonexistence. Presumably the best would be nothing at all!
Voegelin and Santayana reflect in their own distinct ways a vague modern prejudice that divorces significance and meaning from their roots in reality. “Did it happen at all?” is subordinated to “What does it mean?”
A religion based on fact
The Catholic affirmation of the Nativity is based on a fact, not on a theory; on a premise, not on a poem. The Son of God became man. Precisely here we encounter the simultaneously classical and the modern objection to Christianity. By a curious irony the twentieth century seems to have more in common with the first than either age has with what happened in between.
The paganism of the Mediterranean world of the first centuries after the birth of Christ was full of mystery religions in which pale divinities died and rose like the phoenix. They were as ethereal and unreal as the myths in which they lived their shadowy lives. Every corner of the heavily populated Empire was peopled by household gods, charming little creatures who ruled in the vegetable garden beyond the walls of the house and who guarded the marriage bed and the skillets in the scullery.
That world was choked with gods, although by then hardly anybody believed in them any more. But the public power of the Empire preserved them all. They were necessary for the commonweal of a society that otherwise would sink into the darkness of atheism. Men required some meaning for their lives if only as a hedge against despair.
Man is naturally religious: The root of the word itself suggests a bending back to some origin of being, some anchor against the storms of doubt then besieging the Roman order. Few men who governed Rome in their chaste white togas were altogether atheists. Most were so highly skeptical that they admitted every Eastern deity into the pantheon. “What can we really know? After all, these preternatural beings might exist. Even if they do not, a belief in them shores up good manners, supports the law, guarantees contracts, and keeps the peace.”
Rome was highly religious, but its religion was of this world. Gods and men form a common society and, as old Varro had insisted, the city is anterior to its institutions. What counted was the Truth of Rome and not the “truth” of its beliefs, which at bottom were nourished and welcomed because they served the good of the res publica.
The Church did not bend
What pagan classicism could not grant was the Christian claim that there is one God and that his Son was quite literally born in an almost unknown town in Palestine. The radical severity of the Faith undid everything hitherto taken to be englobed by what they understood to be religion. The divine entered time in the womb of a Virgin, and from that day forward the world was stripped of divinity, political existence was cut down to size, and emperors and kings, powers and potentates, were called to bend the knee before Bethlehem.
This was too much for them. The persecutions commenced. The blood of martyrs flowed in the Colosseum. The crosses multiplied along the roadside as Christian victims by the score attested to their faith in Christ. We all know what happened. From the blood of the martyrs was born the Christianizing of the Empire and beyond, centuries yet ahead in the forests of Europe to the north, a Catholic civilization, a res publica christiana, was being stirred into life as an idea if not yet as a thing.
Classical antiquity was not hostile to religion: it was full of it. But classical antiquity bent religion to its own ends and would have done the same with the nascent Christianity had the new Faith been but one star in a galaxy of beliefs that attested to the tolerance of the pagan spirit. Yet the Church did not bend. The Incarnation happened, and everything else in God’s creation takes on meaning and significance in the light of the singular event in which Eternity took unto itself time.
Were I to express the malaise lying at the root of classicism, I would finger it as the reduction of religious truth to religious meaning and their eventual amalgam in a sentimentalization of religion that washes away dogma and eventually leaves man alone and afraid. Pagan religion, with its seasonable rites and its civic pieties, meant much to pagan man, but it was not true, and at the bottom of his soul pagan man knew it. Even Cicero whispered that there were probably no gods at all, but we must never say so out loud. Without them Rome would collapse, and what counts is the city of Rome: In that we do believe.
Correspondence to being
A comparable disease lies at the heart of modern America. Our ties with old Rome are recognized immediately by anybody who wanders through the neo-classical buildings gracing our capital. Our coins mint our adherence to a God in whom we trust. Our congressional sessions are opened with prayers, all of them desanitized of dogma, but all of them resoundingly pious as they recall the “God of our Fathers.” Our Fourth of July ceremonies open with prayers, and, for the most part, we pride ourselves on being one nation under God. We prefer officials in our high offices to be men who honor the Sabbath, and we appoint chaplains to our armed forces. But does this civic religion point to a faith in something that happened, the Incarnation?
The business ought to be put in its most stark outlines. If God became man, was incarnated in the womb of a virgin, then everything man did, has done, and will do, is totally changed. Everything moves forth from and returns to this shattering event. The Christian ethos means something to most Americans, and, even more, it means something to the corporate image that America has of itself. It is highly improbable, though, that this vague Christian sensibility converts itself into an affirmation of the truth of Christianity.
Ptolemaic astronomy was a consistent whole of propositions insisting that the sun and other heavenly bodies orbited a stationary Earth. Were I of a mathematical bent, I could learn this theory, admire its complex internal beauty composed of epicycles turning upon themselves, and I might even note that, were I to use this theory, I could chart the voyage of a vessel from one point upon the globe to another. (Columbus did!) The theory, at least up to a point, works. There is only one thing wrong with Ptolemaic astronomy: it isn’t true. The theory is meaningful but erroneous.
Truth is the conformity of the intellect with things as they are, and things simply are not the way Ptolemy thought them to be. Analogously, a religious cosmology, such as the old classical pagan cosmology, might be meaningful in the sense that it renders life somewhat more tolerable for man than it would have been otherwise, but the pagan world view in itself is not true. It fails to correspond to being.
The magic of Christmas
There was a movement in my youth “to put Christ back into Christmas” and thus mitigate the commercialism of the holiday. But in America it is commercialism that keeps Christmas alive. Men make millions off Christmas, and the sales run up in cash registers and computers by merchants throughout the land make up for the slack in other seasons of the year. Were we to cancel Christmas we would throw out of business merchants both large and small. We would destroy the happy season in which all exchange gifts and sing in the Yuletide. The Christmas season is part of our economy and part of our folklore. It is anti-American to be anti-Christmas.
Christmas weaves its magic in dozens of ways into the warmth we experience toward family and neighbors as we let down the cold egoism that raises up spiked barriers between ourselves throughout the rest of the year. All secularization is bad, but the secularization of Christmas is not as bad as others. At least we give, even though in January we contemplate the bill with horror.
And yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but nobody seems to know precisely what sense to give the word is when said of him. Our society seems to give to the verb “to be” predicated of the Christ Child the same sense it gives to the jolly fat man dressed in red. Both are there in the folklore of December 25, along with reindeer, mangers, angels with wings, stars of Bethlehem, trees and colored balls and candy sticks, and all the glittering cardboard furniture with which we decorate the stage of store windows and family doors, church fronts, and parks. Children are mesmerized by the immemorial magic.
To say that man by nature is religious is to say that by nature he is pagan. He feasts on a surplus that must be consumed. He sacrifices solemnly in duly appointed places hallowed by tradition. He thus tacitly admits his dependence on powers and forces sensed by him to buoy him up in being. He blesses his young and guards his dead in well-kept cemeteries. He sets up statues to his heroes, and he sings songs remembering their deeds.
The Catholic Church has known this and embraced all of it. Thus many of her enemies have called her pagan. But if this natural religiosity be equated formally with religion, then we would have to admit in all candor that Catholic Christianity is no religion at all. Based as it is not on what man does naturally as a religious being, but on what God did freely for man, the faith proclaims the good news that Christ the Savior is born.
The splendor of Christmas known to children (and the mystery known to men who on that day become children again) shatters all categories and refutes the wisdom of this world. Were we to pause when we recite the creed at Mass in order to ponder the awesome and indeed awful affirmation that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” I am afraid we would never get on with the sacrifice. The Church wisely insists that its most solemn liturgical prayer be done swiftly and without personal ruminations by celebrant on the altar or faithful in the pew. The mystery is too terrible to be halted. Were it so halted, frozen as in a vision, we might be struck dead. We certainly would be struck dumb.
Not “I have the truth” but “I am the truth”
If we scrutinize the vast panorama of the great religions that have covered the Earth and changed man in their image, we note that only Christianity claims to be based on a single event, a single fact: the Incarnation of the Son of God. The Incarnation is affirmed within an orthodoxy in which one truth leads to another, and all of them are understood within a complexity of doctrine. The Father sent his Son to save the world, but who is the Father?
Moses asked God to tell his name because Moses had to preach in that name to the children of Israel. We can presume that God might well have said: “I am your Father; I am the holy one; I am the Lord and thy Master, King above every earthly king.” Had God answered Moses in these terms, all of us who attend to these truths would have been satisfied. God is all of these affirmations made of him, but he is more.
He chose to speak otherwise to Moses: “I Am Who Am. Thou shalt say to the children of Israel that he Who Is has sent thee to them.” When asked who he is, we have it—no levity is intended—from the horse’s mouth. God stated, before a burning bush that hid him, that his name is “Is.” “Thou shalt say to the children of Israel that He Who Is Is.”
The other great religions tend to dissolve in speculations about what their founders meant, upon truths they taught, upon dimensions of the real beyond themselves but discovered in their lives. But our Lord did not say: “I have the truth.” He said, “I am the truth (and the way, and the life).” This separates Christ from all myths and mystifications. He stands before all history as the God-Man who says, “Accept me or reject me.”
“What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is he?” This question cannot be answered by a web of conceptualization and imagery. It can be answered only by a yes or a no. Yes and no always answer questions about being, because being is the ultimate and only absolute. Everything else is nothing.
God is. Christ is, first as the eternal Son of the Father, himself God in all his glory, and then as Jesus in a manger, true man born of the Virgin. We affirm all these truths in the creed. To take these propositions literally is to undo everything that previously was in the order of nature. The world is turned upside down, transfigured, altogether itself yet so much more.
The God who names himself “I Am” is the same God who is in the manger on Christmas. The Catholic Faith begins and ends with a God who in every sense is Creator of the world that is, making each and every thing be at this very moment in time. An assertion of the priority of existence runs through the most basic catechism taught youngsters when they are first introduced to the Faith.
The incarnate author of all
The Holy Eucharist we receive at Mass, as indicated, is quite literally our Lord, body and soul, humanity and divinity, eternal Word of God and the Child of the Nativity. Our entire Faith is woven into a tapestry of affirmations all bearing on being. A youthful carpenter’s apprentice, as Chesterton called him, declared that “Before Abraham was, I Am,” thus taking to himself the solemn name of God, and those who heard him knew what he meant and would have stoned him to death had it then been possible.
Later they murdered him on a cross, and it is in the theology of the Crucifixion that the full import of what I am suggesting comes home to us in its most awesome dimensions. Theologians tell us that when he hung there those three hours, in which mankind was redeemed, he summed up all existence—both human and cosmic—in which all time came together in a supreme moment of salvation and the tears of history, from its first beginning to its final end in judgment, were wiped away by the incarnate Author of all that is.
This is Christmas. Do not lock yourself in a room and ponder all these truths. Go out into the streets and sing with the herald angel, “Glory to the newborn King.” Remember the poor man with his hat in hand. He figures the poor Child. Both will come to you on Christmas Day. Never forget: If you haven’t got a half penny, then God bless you.